I If #Ballarat makes a mistake, people are fallible and can be forgiven with the proper measure of responsibility and maturity to recognise, repair and rise above wrongs. If I make a mistake, I’m the same morally dubious reprobate I’ve been since high school and need more Tough Love until I grow up
Edit: Or least stop acting normal and not like a faggot who’s too good for a tummy-tum full of social climber ingroup jizz
II
The cops came to my door yesterday. I pointed out to them that if they did their jobs keeping the peace things would never escalate in the first place. I was in handcuffs within nanoseconds. Am starting to wonder if people in this town are insecure about communicating with me outside of social and thought control contexts tbh.
After being at the cop shop, I got a taxi home. The taxi driver was South Asian. He was a nice dude; people who aren’t born and raised in Australia often are in my experience. We were talking about Uber’s business model and he reckoned they showed up in the village during the Spilt Milk festival to charge 60 bucks for the same journey that cost me about 17. Outrageous but did figure for a social order where predators make the rules and takers make the social culture. We both agreed the only people who make money from Uber are the ones who own shares in it.
We ended up sitting around chatting for about as long as the journey again when he was dropping me off; the guy was all, “Man, I came to Australia looking for a new life, and I’m giving it all. I work hard, I bought some land, but you can never get ahead. The taxes are endless, everyone has their hand out. I’m about ready to leave again. I can’t stand it.” I was like, man, I’m right with you. I was born here and I can’t stand life in this country.
And it’s true. All it ever does is set you up to fail if you don’t or can’t play along with the rat race. If you can’t complete, you’re a loser. If you won’t complete, you’re a nonconformist faggot who only says bad things about groupthink and selfish individualism because you have micropenis anxiety. And you are for well sure a target, you are nothing if not one. When it’s not taking from you it’s pushing you around. Ballarat thugs you out of jobs and puts IVOs on you for making complaints about workplace bullying, and then tries to thug you back into them later when the powers that be feel like taking again.
Funny thing about Australia, we’re for sure all in this together when you have obligations to work and contribute to quarterly dividends. It’s about the only time we are.
Interesting convo, though. After abandoning his first franchise, my father married a Thai woman though an agency. When I was 11 he showed me a letter she sent him saying ‘I love you,’ in broken English. He was all, forget about your crazy bitch mother, look at your old man the stud kicking romance goals. Class act if ever there was one. I didn’t like her either and never made any attempt to stay in touch after he died, but last I heard she felt about the same way as yesterday’s taxi driver . . . like after being in this country for decades. Makes total sense. Australia is no different to the US when it comes to that line from Killing Them Softly:
You don’t live in Australia for a good life, you live in Australia for a killing. I feel sorry for migrants, I’m pretty sure a lot of them learn that one the hard way.
III
I went to Sweden for a conference in 2019. I had won a research scholarship to do a history phd at WSU on the ideological roots of the climate emergency, and then got thugged out of it when I did too good a job of my research and started to threaten careers built on not noticing, you know, the ideological root causes of the climate emergency. Apparently.
Europe is for sure very different, in any number of ways. I amused the shit out of someone at Copenhagen Central Station asking if it was really okay to drink the beer I had just bought from the 7-11 on the concourse. They looked at me like I had been hanging around at Southern Cross asking if it was okay to drink a Coke in public: boy you just got off the boat, huh. In Prague I stood around for a few moments one day watching council workers chew out rough sleepers around the bottom of the big-ass Gothic cathedral in the old town for sleeping on old cardboard boxes and demanding they take some fresh ones they just brought around on a trolley attached to a golf cart. You don’t see that in Australia.
It’s funny when you get back here though. Sure as shit no shelves of beer in 7-11. No baguettes or good good either. You go into a 7-11 at Tullamarine and instead of baguettes and healthy food, you have wall-to-wall pies and pastry to go with the wall-to-wall Gatorade and Mountain Dew. Have some colon cancer to go with your diabetes and high blood pressure. Wandering around Tullamarine after a few weeks in the old world sure puts a new lens on things as well. A reservoir of savagery and brutality bubbling away not very far below the surface. Maybe it’s the cold-blooded murder on which the regime of nominal liberal contract and consent was built. Maybe it’s all the shit food we put down our faces.
Either way I’m pretty sure I fucked my life not leaving permanently. Even if you wind up a rough sleeper on the streets of Prague, at least the council workers make it their job to show you some love. Streets ahead of the respectable middle class in a settler colonial land of competition right there.
IV
How does the seething underbelly of violence and the desire to reconstruct harm as a benefit to upstarts who don’t know their place manifest as a DV epidemic, I’ll never figure. Imagine if you had a dollar for every divorcee who is an authoritarian bootlicker and racist, and hates woke faggotry, but is also for sure a feminist at least for as long as it takes to jump on the virtue-hoarding bandwagons of self-appointed morality police hiding from themselves inside sterile social cliques. You could afford to leave.
V
When I started primary school at Ballarat College, there was this one kid who was kind of tall and lanky, and he had huge buck teeth. They stood right out, poor fucker. The other kids figured out pretty quickly he would schitz right out if they paid out on him long enough. Soon enough he schitzed out without much pushing at all. He would get red in the face and scream SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP and then try to attack people, he was so mad.
I got in on it once, then I felt totally terrible about it haha. I can still remember crying as I was telling my mum about the way they were treating him. They were nasty as fuck and they didn’t care. All they cared about was getting the reaction and knowing they had the power to get under his skin. I stopped joining in in the ‘Make the buck-tooth kid flip out’ routine. I don’t know if my mum said anything to College or not, but I don’t seem to remember it happening much after that.
I was the fat kid in the class hahaha. All the little College brats stopped hounding the buck-tooth kid and just went after the fat fuck instead. And they’ve never stopped lol.
Oh well, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you I guess. At least they stopped picking on that kid who wasn’t old enough for braces or whose parents didn’t have the bank to spring for them, wretched little crotch goblin fucks. I looked for that dude on Fakebook at one point. He was married with a kid and living out on the land somewhere. He looked like he was doing okay, made me glad to see.
VI
I wound up in the Ballarat psych ward more than once. Not that Ballarat is a developmental meatgrinder or one that just stays that way once you’re done with school or anything but. Not that you never get to leave the playground, but it just moves online, or anything lol.
One great think about the psych ward is that everyone is pretty honest about having mental health issues. It’s a bit hard not to be. It’s actually pretty refreshing. It’s like the opposite of prison; if prisons are universities of crime, the psych ward is the university of you’re not actually alone with the kinds of struggles that land you in the psych ward. I would go so far as to wonder out loud whether or not we shouldn’t get people who have successfully battled and survived mental health issues to work as counselors and therapists, instead of just reading about them in the fucking DSM-V. The fuck do I know though. I did honestly like the psych ward though; everyone was beside themelves and out of their tree, but you know what: they had no pretences to the contrary. Nice change from the open-air asylum outside the door where we’re all very much the same, but a lot less honest about it. Innit.
You definitely get a window into parts of Ballarat you don’t usually see. I befriended a woman in there who had been battered. She had her phone in the hallway for a few minutes one day, and I was wondering past so she stopped me and showed me some photos she had. I had never seen photos of a domestic abuse victim before. I hope never to again, in all honesty. The bruises weren’t blue. They weren’t purple. They were black, like the night. They were big, like pancakes. They were on every part of her body. They weren’t taken over time either, like one healed up and then there was another one. They were all there at the same time. Everywhere, all in a series of photos taken at the same time.
They were atrocity photos, and that’s all they were. I said as much as we stood there in the hallway. I didn’t know what else to say, besides swearing quite a bit I guess. My friend spent a lot of her time evading the staff so she could cut herself; she gave me some manic spiel about how it was actually good for her, like it gave her a buzz and lifted her out of her hole. Every part of me was so sad when she said that, no kidding.
Ballarat has a savage vibe, just like Australia does, barely contained beneath the surface. You feel it getting off a plane after being out of the southern hemisphere for a few weeks. Atrocity photos confirm it. It’s a savage land.
On a not dissimilar note, Ballarat’s male suicide rate is 30% above the state average. Men inflict black bruises on the outside. Women inflict them on the inside. Dudes catch more black and blue than we can deal with and check out. Fuck knows I’ve seriously considered it more than once.
This I kind of get:
Apparently the state government threw 10 million bucks into this campaign. From what I could gather it was everything a technocracy can do for the people short of get off our backs. Half of Laborism is Tough Love and reconstructing the harm it does as beneficial to its victims, not least when it’s advancing women to girlboss positions and letting them be nastier authoritarians than their male counterparts by way of proving themselves their equals. Who better to preach respect.
I’m not honestly sure what that is supposed to achieve, really, what any government preaching respect for the individual is supposed to achieve, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to stop the problem. It sure as shit doesn’t represent the end of social climbing liberal feminists essentialising the harms of structural patriarchy down to the attitude malfunctions of individual men, and letting the class hierarchies they want to climb off the hook in the process. Liberal feminists are the nastiest people around by far around in my experience, truly vicious, pious shitlords who seem to feel entitled to embody everything they claim to oppose in the name of combating the certain evil that is patriarchal capitalism. Saying women are the only people who deserve respect, while single-issue politics liberals dish out inside bruises until you’re black and blue like the vicious domestic abusers they claim to oppose dish out visible ones, makes about as much sense as saying Jews are the only ones who suffer the evils of racial supremacism and are the only ones who should benefit from the politics of antifascism.
Honestly, I saw this as I was walking past and thought pretty much, yeah whoever did that speaks for every dude who got on the wrong side of middle-class liberals looking to be the equal of the deadshits who dish out bruises on the outside. Respect goes both ways, between men and women, middle class and working class, or it doesn’t, and we just end up with more power struggles instead. Which is how it works out in practise, isn’t it.
10 million bucks. Pay one person to raise mental health awareness amongst men, dealing with inner turmoil instead of acting out on it, and amongst women. Stop belitting men’s struggles so you don’t have to factor either class or structural violence into your shit politics and maybe we’ll act out on them less when we’re being supported to work through them instead, who knows. We don’t all grow up in comfortable, secure homes with both parents around to show us ropes before we’re torn to shreds for not knowing them by castrating, social climbing selfish individualists who were happy enough apparently to accept the bribes dangled by the rat race.
VII
When I was a teenage skateboarding nut (as distinct from the greying one I am now), I spent a lot of my time down the street, like a lot of teenagers in the 90s. At Central Square in particular, that is. Back in the 1990s there was nary an intertubes to be seen anywhere. There sure as shit weren’t mobile phones or Fakebook sorry I mean Fakebook. You carried around lists of people’s numbers in your wallet and called from them from a payphone, which were profligate. Life was definitely different without all the technology. Not entirely convinced we were all knuckledragging cavemen either. Well everyone else might have been. I shit sunbeams, personally, vote the born-to-rules of the LNP.
You got to know a fair few people around the traps spending enough time around them. Dopamine addictions are weird, because people don’t wander about the streets being outdoors and off their devices and out of their codependent cyber-cocoons so much these days. You would be sitting around on your skateboard in the Central Square Mall way back when it was closed off to traffic, like, oh there’s that dude I owe five bucks, I should probably stay out of sight, or like, there’s that chick Warwick was going out with two girlfriends ago chatting to, uh, Warwick, or whatever. You know. Oh, Brendan’s over yonder talking to Craig, I hope he’s not badmouthing me because I pressure-flipped his brand new deck and ground the pristine ply on the tail. It would be a bit fucked up if that ever butterfly -effected into something.
In all seriousness, Ballarat has always had a way of producing weirdos and outcasts. The odd freakshow even. It doesn’t mind removing masks of civility and aborting ethical core to do it either. One such heinous oddball at this point in time was a feller by the name of Radio Dave. He was a bloke in his late 20s or early 30s maybe, not attached or settled, which you could gather from the boombox he carried around with him blasting metal everywhere he went, and here and there having words with someone despite being seated on his own, like at the bus stop. He a bit resembled Eric Bana’s Chopper, but like without so much of the dark triad maybe–ocker, fairly solidly built, with a bit of a belly, typically in light blue denim from head to foot for good measure. Like Chopper, somehow you couldn’t help but like the cunt. He was also obviously pretty damaged.
Radio Dave was really into Iron Maiden. Like, I don’t mind Iron Maiden, but as far as metal goes I much prefer Slayer, personally. For the record. I get the appeal of all the pagan and celtic steezo, that’s why I listen to Electric Wizard. I don’t think there’s any kind of Ford/GMH standoff over streams of heavy metal though hey. I should give them more time. Anyway, having still not really adequately laboured the point but let’s move on anyway, at the time I personally found Iron Maiden not my major cup of tea, and I’m pretty sure I had sympathisers there, but you know, everyone knows, it’s Radio Dave. Radio Dave loves Iron Maiden and wants to share it with everyone.
So everyone stops what they’re doing when Radio Dave wanders past. The poor bugger’s boombox isn’t even that flash, it’s some sort of el-cheapo like they sell over at Dick Smith’s in Wendouree Village over next to the greasy arcade with all the best games for the proles to keep them sedated and compliant. There’s no low end in the speakers. It can still pump up the volume though, no issues there. RUN TO THE HILLS BUT NOT AT 40HZ (the first part is solid advice, not just per the personal malfunctions of yours truly either). Before not long dudes would go up to him and start talking to him, maybe partly at least to get him to turn the music down a notch. Radio Dave probably figured out they would and made it a habit so people would come up to him and say, yo, Radio Dave, what’s the hap–hap, brother? Can you turn the music down a notch?
I was honestly a little bit scared to talk to Radio Dave, personally, tbh. I can still remember one other dude, who was a black metal fan at the time but later became a pentacostal christian, saying, nah he’s cool, he’s alright to talk to, he gave me one of his tapes to listen to. No one really had to say: Go easy on Radio Dave, but you just know. The kids up to that point didn’t mind having laughs at his expense; one dude videoed Radio Dave in the food court doing his tic thing one day. Didn’t get his consent to film him, it was the 90s. Radio Dave snapped into mid air like a dog snapping at a fly, and the dude just played it over and over and over in someone’s living room one afternoon. I didn’t feel like it was that funny, but it wasn’t me and that dude had way more pull than me, so I kept my mouth shut.
I guess you get older, which maybe helps with maturity levels. Here and there. Nothing will help in the case of bootlickers hiding behind freedom like yellowbelly cowards instead of standing in front of it and defending it for everyone but, just so its said. Irrespective of that fact, I feel like attitudes changed noticably towards Radio Dave once people bothered to go and talk to the guy. No more paying out on some poor bastard you filmed without asking them because you don’t have to suffer the same problem so it’s funny that they’re so abnormal and such a freakshow for our passing amusement. I remember someone saying at some point later he has a tragic story. At length someone even took a camera out and interviewed him, and shit that’s probably even on youtube.
This is the guy: Radio Dave, immortalised on the internet. He doesn’t bark at the no one he’s sitting with or go off with weird ticks you can video when you buy the dude a coffee and ask him about himself, so your understanding improves and you send him the implicit message that other people mattering to a reject matters, because we live in a community and not a sterile clique of codependent self-seekers hiding from ourselves and our own subjective alienation as winners defining ourselves by those we exclude trying to be top rat of the rat race. How about that.
TBC
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